Bar of the week: Out Of The Blue at The Berkeley

Every week, we scour the city to find the best bars our capital has to offer. Whether you're a cocktail kind of guy, or a man who enjoys a decent draft beer, there's a GQ-worthy drinking spot to suit every taste.

Valentine's Day ideas that are guaranteed to impress her

From gorgeous gifts to romantic getaways and the best places to take your beau out to celebrate, we've compiled the ultimate list of Valentine's Day ideas for her - as chosen by the women of GQ - to treat your better half with this 14 February

Bar of the week: Out Of The Blue at The Berkeley

Every week, we scour the city to find the best bars our capital has to offer. Whether you're a cocktail kind of guy, or a man who enjoys a decent draft beer, there's a GQ-worthy drinking spot to suit every taste.

Valentine's Day ideas that are guaranteed to impress her

From gorgeous gifts to romantic getaways and the best places to take your beau out to celebrate, we've compiled the ultimate list of Valentine's Day ideas for her - as chosen by the women of GQ - to treat your better half with this 14 February

Where Cheshire and Shropshire meet, in early winter, probably isn’t what Bentley’s brand magus had in mind as the new Bentley Continental GT’s natural habitat. But while we’d all sooner be sweeping through the Camargue or Sonoma Valley, mud-flecked British B-roads will just have to do. Besides, if the car works here, it’ll work anywhere.

And boy does it work. The new Bentley Continental GT sends shimmering fireworks exploding through leaden November skies. Possessor of one of the most hi-tech yet exquisitely hand-crafted interiors in the car world – there’s ten square metres of veneer inside - 310,675 stitches in the leather, and a gazillion lines of code, amongst other ‘dazzle-your-friends’ numerical feats. The Bentley Continental GT even smells good enough to enliven a sullen Monday. As for its mesmeric attention to detail: reach inside the interior door lever, and the surface your fingers meet is lightly knurled for that little extra bit of traction you never knew you needed.

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Speaking of which, the new Bentley Continental GT can lay claim to being the new fastest point-to-point car in the real world. Part of that is down to a different sort of traction, the kind generated by an all-wheel drive chassis, which enables you to hustle this big, imposing car – all six litres, 12 cylinders and 626bhp of it – with the sort of confidence you’d deploy in something much smaller or lighter, whatever the weather.

This is a heavy car – 2250kg – but it feels positively lithe compared to its predecessor, turning into corners with tremendous agility and accuracy, while also nailing the traditional Bentley luxo-cruiser wafty thing. GQ’s test drive was in a pre-production car, riding on huge 22in wheels wrapped in colossal Pirelli tyres. On the broken tarmac of Brexit Britain, this could have been a horror show. The Bentley, though, just makes the real world fade away, which is one of those abstract abilities you pay the really big bucks for.

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But I’m getting ahead of myself here. Bentley has sold 70,000 Continental GTs since this Stentorian coupe spearheaded the venerable British brand’s rebirth back in 2003. The VW Group, when it’s not fiddling its diesel emissions, has a serious thing for collecting trophies, and Bentley sits alongside the likes of Bugatti, Lamborghini, and Porsche. This is good for pooling expensively developed resources, provided the different teams manage to imbue their various creations with their own distinct personalities. By and large, they do, and in the guise of the new Bentley Continental GT, this might just be the finest car ever to wear the famous winged badge, if not the best group product overall as 2017 shudders to a halt (better even than a Bugatti Chiron, and not much slower in reality).

The twin-turbo, 6.0-litre W12 engine has been reworked to deliver more power (626bhp) whilst improving efficiency. It’s also been moved back and sits lower, for an improved centre-of-gravity, and has twin injection, clever twin turbos and active engine mounts. One side of the entire engine shuts down in third-through-eighth gear below 3000rpm, to help overall efficiency. Bentley is not messing around here, quite obviously, even if emissions and the cost of a litre of super unleaded is unlikely to be a major trauma for the typical end user.

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The Bentley Continental GT’s architecture is related to the hardware used by Porsche – one of the main group synergies – so you get a chassis that mixes aluminium with high tensile steel, draped in artfully formed aluminium body panels. Its suspension uses a 48-volt electrical system – similar to the one in the Bentayga SUV – for a compliant, saintly ride quality without the cheap motel waterbed body roll that’s the usual by-product.

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It also uses a triple-chambered air suspension, whose parameters are governed in the car across different modes: Comfort, a B for Bentley setting, Sport, and Custom. I had a twiddle, but opted to leave the car in its default B mode for the cross-country route I was on. In effect, it serves up a ‘greatest hits’ of the car’s myriad suspension possibilities, and the body control it delivers is little short of miraculous considering the mass it has to contend with. As is the ride quality, which is simply astounding on a car that uses such huge wheels.

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Design is the principal differentiator at this heady end of the game. It’s also one of the biggest challenges when you’re bidding farewell to the car that saved your bacon. More so even than the outgoing car, the new model channels the elegant grandiosity of the 1950s R-type Continental, a car whose patrons included Ian Fleming and Aristotle Onassis - Keith Richards favoured the later S3 Continental, an example of which, nicknamed Blue Lena, he once drove from London to Marrakech.

"You either evolve what you have, or make a radical change," design director Stefan Sielaff told GQ recently. "Our customers need to 'find' the car immediately". Sielaff cites fighter jets, London’s razor-cut, Renzo Piano designed Shard and a crystal tumbler of whisky as visual stimuli (you can see their influence in the headlights, in the graphics, and the interior detailing). He doesn’t mention The Stones’ errant guitarist, which is a shame.

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A vast amount of thought has gone into this car, make no mistake. The front wings, in particular, have tremendous volume: this is because the aluminium is shaped using a technique called ‘superforming’. "It’s expensive and demanding," Sielaff says, "but the result are these wonderful curves and tight radii." He’s not kidding.

The new car somehow looks similar to the old one yet completely different at the same time. Or at least once you’ve had a really close look at it. It doesn’t give up its secrets too easily. Like the old car, the propulsive rear wheel-arches, subtle window graphics, and the big, punchy front grille and lights are signatures. Although it looks lower and meaner, it’s actually the same height and a fraction wider than before, while the wheelbase has been extended to enhance the Conti’s presence, charisma, and sheer expensiveness, all without scaring off the more conservative end of the car’s client base (not all of whom are Premiership footballers or Russian oligarchs).

Before driving it, I’d have put odds on the interior being the Bentley Continental GT’s unassailable USP. After 45 minutes dancing this thing from apex-to-apex in a way you would never have dreamt of doing in the old car, I simply forgot about its ear-popping Naim audio system, magnificent seats, or the crown jewel central display. This uses 40 individual motors to rotate out of view, offers up three trad gauges if you prefer that, or leaves the main display intact.

It’s so precise it has 0.5mm tolerances on its action and even has its own dedicated cooling system. The software uses self-learning algorithms – oh please – and when hidden away you’re left with an uninterrupted view of the dashboard, bisected by a pin stripe as sharp as anything on Savile Row. Needless to say, much lucre currently sequestered in Panama or within the Paradise Papers could be usefully diverted via the company’s Mulliner bespoke department. The £154,000 starting price is exactly that.

Bentley is promising software tweaks to smooth out the occasional clunk the eight-speed dual-shift auto is prone to and I found the whoosh and whumpf from the turbos a bit irritating. Cars like the Bentley Continental GT have to transcend their transport function to justify their place in the modern world. This new Bentley Continental GT is a rare example of a car vastly greater than the sum of its parts. In fact, it might even be something of a masterpiece.